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This brings us to the Spindle-destiny, spun according to the
ancients by the Fates. To Plato the Spindle represents the
co-operation of the moving and the stable elements of the kosmic
circuit: the Fates with Necessity, Mother of the Fates,
manipulate it and spin at the birth of every being, so that all
comes into existence through Necessity.
In the Timaeus, the creating God bestows the essential of the
Soul, but it is the divinities moving in the kosmos [the stars]
that infuse the powerful affections holding from Necessity our
impulse and our desire, our sense of pleasure and of pain- and
that lower phase of the Soul in which such experiences originate.
By this statement our personality is bound up with the stars,
whence our Soul [as total of Principle and affections] takes
shape; and we are set under necessity at our very entrance into
the world: our temperament will be of the stars' ordering, and
so, therefore, the actions which derive from temperament, and all
the experiences of a nature shaped to impressions.
What, after all this, remains to stand for the "We"?
The "We" is the actual resultant of a Being whose nature
includes, with certain sensibilities, the power of governing
them. Cut off as we are by the nature of the body, God has yet
given us, in the midst of all this evil, virtue the
unconquerable, meaningless in a state of tranquil safety but
everything where its absence would be peril of fall.
Our task, then, is to work for our liberation from this sphere,
severing ourselves from all that has gathered about us; the total
man is to be something better than a body ensouled- the bodily
element dominant with a trace of Soul running through it and a
resultant life-course mainly of the body- for in such a
combination all is, in fact, bodily. There is another life,
emancipated, whose quality is progression towards the higher
realm, towards the good and divine, towards that Principle which
no one possesses except by deliberate usage but so may
appropriate, becoming, each personally, the higher, the
beautiful, the Godlike, and living, remote, in and by It- unless
one choose to go bereaved of that higher Soul and therefore, to
live fate-bound, no longer profiting, merely, by the significance
of the sidereal system but becoming as it were a part sunken in
it and dragged along with the whole thus adopted.
For every human Being is of twofold character; there is that
compromise-total and there is the Authentic Man: and it is so
with the Kosmos as a whole; it is in the one phase a conjunction
of body with a certain form of the Soul bound up in body; in the
other phase it is the Universal Soul, that which is not itself
embodied but flashes down its rays into the embodied Soul: and
the same twofold quality belongs to the Sun and the other members
of the heavenly system.
To the remoter Soul, the pure, sun and stars communicate no
baseness. In their efficacy upon the [material] All, they act as
parts of it, as ensouled bodies within it; and they act only upon
what is partial; body is the agent while, at the same time, it
becomes the vehicle through which is transmitted something of the
star's will and of that authentic Soul in it which is steadfastly
in contemplation of the Highest.
But [with every allowance to the lower forces] all follows either
upon that Highest or rather upon the Beings about It- we may
think of the Divine as a fire whose outgoing warmth pervades the
Universe- or upon whatsoever is transmitted by the one Soul [the
divine first Soul] to the other, its Kin [the Soul of any
particular being]. All that is graceless is admixture. For the
Universe is in truth a thing of blend, and if we separate from it
that separable Soul, the residue is little. The All is a God when
the divine Soul is counted in with it; "the rest," we read, "is a
mighty spirit and its ways are subdivine."
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